It’s not that I’m particularly sensitive about what I’ll write, if you pay me enough.
I’ve written speeches for politicians (“…feed the hungry…clothe the naked…”); I’ve written speeches for business guys (“…our employees are our most important asset…”); I’ve cranked out corporate annual reports (..” we will solidify our gains, while maintaining our commitment to stakeholders…” ).
But there’s some stuff I just couldn’t bring myself to write, even if my identity was buried in a concrete vault and someone else took credit for the ideas.
Consider the comments of Vermont’s Gov. Jim Douglas at the University of Vermont commencement, in which he begged the graduates to stay in Vermont, because “our success will depend largely on you.”
Put aside for the moment that the message sounds a bit pathetic and desperate. Note that the governor didn’t say, “Glory be to God for plopping you in Vermont, Heaven on Earth; Say a little prayer for those who through accident of birth must live in a hellish place like Massachusetts or somewhere like that.”
Of course, Vermont isn’t the only small, cold, isolated New England jurisdiction attempting to trick its youngsters into believing that the grass is always browner on the other side.
New Hampshire is working on a scheme with its state university system and employers to help graduates pay off their federal college loans, if they stay in the state for four years after graduation. There’s no income tax in New Hampshire – and the liquor is cheap. How much more incentive is necessary?
Wanderlust
Well, even New Hampshire isn’t the Garden of Eden. An academic study of Coos County, the part of rural New Hampshire that is sort of near the Arctic Circle, reported that youngsters up there have ‘strong ties” to the area, but are inclined to escape when they grow up, looking for better opportunities.
It borders on immoral to encourage our young to feel guilty about sniffing around beyond the tax jurisdiction into which they were born. One of the great strengths of America is our willingness to move, to search, to sniff around other places, looking for better jobs, a lower cost of living, more opportunities to work and play. If I’m born in Rhode Island, wherever that is, should I really feel obligated to stay in a place that I can bike across in two hours, after stopping for coffee?
From 2000 to 2007, the population growth was a massive 1.6 percent – about on par with other places where taxes are too high, housing is too expensive, and factory towns don’t have any factories. There is New York, at 1.7 percent; there is Michigan, at 1.3 percent. New Hampshire, of course, that place with no income tax and cheap booze, grew 6.5 percent in the same period.
The Northeast remains the slowest-growing region of the country, reinforced by recent legislation in Massachusetts capping the number of registered Republicans allowed in the state at 308. The Northeast is not in “crisis.” We don’t have to beg our kids to stay home. The kids get the message. If you are very wealthy or very poor, you can’t do much better than the Northeast. If you’re looking for opportunity that isn’t strangled by high taxes and constipated regulation, move somewhere else.
The Census Bureau reports that the recession has slowed the instinct to move, but over time, the ability and instinct to move away is an important safety valve to relieve the pressure of inferior state and local government.
Of course, there is an argument to be made that instead of running away from tyranny, you should stay home and fight for what’s right. That’s why I’m still at Banker & Tradesman, trying to get paid. As University of Michigan law professor Douglas Laycock put it in an essay in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “voting with your feet is a sugarcoated way to describe what happens when dissenters are driven out of the community.”
There is nothing wrong with a bit of cheerleading about the old home town, but at the end of the day, earnings versus migration costs may well win the day as an equation for many college graduates. That’s not a bad thing for the nation.
